Posted
by
samzenpus
on Sunday September 14, 2014 @02:11PM
from the odd-couple dept.

mdsolar writes with this story of a company that uses solar energy to recover crude oil. Royal Dutch Shell has teamed with a sovereign investment fund from Oman to invest $53 million in a company that manufactures solar power equipment designed for increasing oil production. Glasspoint Solar Inc. installs aluminum mirrors near oil fields that concentrate solar radiation on insulated tubes containing water. The steam generated from heating the water is injected into oil fields to recover heavy crude oil. This concept of enhanced oil recovery. involves high pressure injection of hot fluids to recover heavy crude oil. The use of renewable energy like solar power makes great economic sense, as the fuel cost associated with this enhanced oil recovery technology is practically zero. Shell hopes to employ this technology in its oil fields in Oman. The company hopes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions associated with enhanced oil recovery operations. A large-scale successful implementation of this technology could be a game changer for major consumers like India and the U.S.. Both have substantial oil reserves, but are unable to tap them due to high costs involved in heavy oil recovery.

Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Thursday March 28, 2013 @02:50PM
from the now-and-forever dept.

sfcrazy writes "Google has announced the Open Patent Non-Assertion (OPN) Pledge. In the pledge Google says that they will not sue any user, distributor, or developer of Open Source software on specified patents, unless first attacked. Under this pledge, Google is starting off with 10 patents relating to MapReduce, a computing model for processing large data sets first developed at Google. Google says that over time they intend to expand the set of Google's patents covered by the pledge to other technologies."
This is in addition to the Open Invention Network, and their general work toward reforming the patent system. The patents covered in the OPN will be free to use in Free/Open Source software for the life of the patent, even if Google should transfer ownership to another party. Read the text of the pledge. It appears that interaction with non-copyleft licenses (MIT/BSD/Apache) is a bit weird: if you create a non-free fork it appears you are no longer covered under the pledge.

I'm probably going to modded into oblivion, but I'm sorry I simply don't buy what this article by the World Bank is selling
Temperatures have remained steady for 16 years now in spite of computer models released by the IPCC which show that by now temperatures should be much higher. So there's likely a negative feedback effect that has been left undocumented by most models, and this should be concerning many people in the climate science game.
Honestly, this articles smacks of an attempt by the World Bank to scare people into getting on board an ETS - from which they will directly benefit in a financial manner. I really wish that anyone outside of the sphere of science would stop making unfounded claims to push their own agendas.

Furthermore drought in Russia, Europe, and Australia means they aren't having bumper crops to offset that loss.

.

I can't speak for Russia or Europe, but Australia is definitely not in a drought and hasn't been for at least the last 2 years. In fact at the moment we are in the middle of a La Nina event, with more flooding than anything else. Most of our dams are either at 100% capacity, or close to that as well - they'd in fact all be at 100% if it wasn't for "environmental flows".